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The Mindset of the Class of 2029
theodp writes "In response to Beloit College's 10th Annual Mindset List, which takes a stab at describing the worldview of the incoming Class of 2011 (grew up with bottled water; have always had the World Wide Web), Valleywag's Nick Douglas presages The Mindset of the Class of 2029 (have always been able to use a cell phone on a plane; 'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable)."
The mindset of anyone who has had to sit on a plane for 9 hours listening to an inane cellphone call will not be healthy. The only hope of salvation is that by then your cellphone/camera/gps/projector/printer/mp8player/s extoy/flashlight/pda/radio convergence device will have a battery life of 3 seconds, and/or banned from the plane by the government to stop you pirating the in flight movie.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
... that people were ever against euthanasia. If all those old people were ever to accumulate the hospital industry would collapse. Maybe that's why they called them "boomers".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Rather, I think they'll find it boring because it's not interactive.
That the government was so big and bloated before Emperor Bush dissolved the Senate.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
... "grew up on bottled air"
add another one to the list
Osama Bin Laden is still the boogey man
Bite my shiny metal ass.
The world's largest Theme Park is HolyLand, run by the Disney Corp. It "features the colorful and historic actual former countries of Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Of course, all inhabitants are Disney employees wearing colorful costumes. Parting of the Red Sea at 10 am, noon, and 2 pm. When asked what happened to the former inhabitants, the tour guides always say, "We don't like to talk about that," and offer a two-for-one coupon for the donkey ride in Jerusalem.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Duke Nukem is still not out yet.
Sig it.
Current terrorist witchhunts were as laughable as the McCarthy Hearings. Oh wait, they already are.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a sever
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
clicky here
Last year I was walking through the Home Depot. I needed an item of certain specs for a project, but I didn't know if that item even existed. I asked several employees for help, but if it didn't have a name, the thing didn't exist, as far as they were concerned. I wandered around for a little bit, wondering which isle I might find my mythical device. Then it struck me -- "I'll look it up on google!"
In retrospect, this seems astoundingly obvious. I was using my 2400 baud modem to dial-up BBSes before "The Internet", and I was asking my college classmates if they had tried Google yet for their internet searches back in '98-'99. But even though I'm relatively young and computer savvy, the information revolution has not completely saturated my mind. I'll be a foreigner who learned to speak the language late in his teen; I'll forever have an accent. I grew up in a world of libraries and card catalogs, of unhelpful adults who knew little of the subjects I wanted to learn about, and experts who couldn't answer questions that I didn't know how to pose. The world I grew up in was opaque, by default. I grew up in an information famine. If there was a weird or esoteric subject that made itself known to me somehow -- perhaps a short reference in a comic book -- I would spend days or weeks wondering about it. I would spend fruitless hours in the library trying to look it up, or getting blank stares from librarians or store owners.
But the kids these days -- anything they might want to know is sitting there in the computer room. They will never know a world of informationlessness. Everything from obscure programming langauges to Hatian Gods to currrent events, right in front of them.
Amazing things are in the pipeline. I hope I live as long as I can!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Really? With OnDemand, iTunes, UnBox, Xbox Marketplace, P2P, etc. ?
Snail mailed disks are antiquated you damn old timer. Non-downloadable movies will be a laughable distant memory in 18 years.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable)
My prediction: Lord of the Rings will become a cult classic among the youth of the next 20 years. When it has become accepted as a mainstay of American culture, Peter Jackson will admit he was never truly satisfied with the poor quality of the special effects and release 3 "Special Edition" movies. These will feature new special effects and opening sequence in which Sauron was just actually just kicking back in Mordor, enjoying a lemonade on his gazebo with the orphans he just adopted - when suddenly Elendil walks up and pimp slaps Sauron across the face with a mace. This will trigger a campaign known as "Sauron maced first" seeking to restore the original concept and flavor of both characters.
After meeting with some success with these Special Editions, Jackson will decide to release a 3 movie prequel based on The Hobbit which will feature the dwarf Thorin replaced by a lovable anthropomorphic fish-dwarf who likes to say "Mesa gonna havea big adventures with yousa Hobbit, sah" who everyone will hate. Following their release, the class of 2029 will complain that Peter Jackson has ruined their childhoods by destroying the movies they had grown up loving so much.
HEADLINE: 100th nuke detonated this year
Remember back when we should have taken care of those fundamentalist christian extremists running america?
Comin' up next on The Violence Channel: An all-new "Ow, My Balls!"
What?
It's the fucking armpit of the midwestern liberal arts schools. Give it a WIDE BERTH. If you're stupid enough to go, don't even think of staying in "810", or its nearby dorm (I forget the number...6-something?)
Please help metamoderate.
So no more 2-dimensional information entry that is easily mappable to a 2-dimensional visual display?
Interesting. Maybe we'll have mind controlled computers finally.
If alive, in 2029 I'll be 53, ouch.
What will it really be like?
All newborns are imprinted with DNA sequences, that uniquely identify a person. Basically everyone's DNA will have a serial number. Obviously many will resist this but the anti-terrorist laws will be strong, comrades. From then on this tech will proliferate into all aspects of life, various ID schemes will be implemented on top of this tech. Obviously people will find work-arounds, but all illegal of-course.
Various genetic types of treatment, still no cure for AIDS, but people won't die from it directly anymore. Still no cure for many types of cancer, but detection is much better and if detected in time, survival rate will approach 90%.
Patented life forms used in manufacturing of goods. Patented viruses, bacteria, insects, cows, pigs, wheat, rice, corn, apples, etc. used to efficiently provide the population of 9 billion people with food, shelter, clothing, energy, entertainment and medication.
Patented people. AI built on top of a computer network that will use humans as nodes for intuition and any non-programmable functionality.
Polygamy legalized in China, one woman will be able to have many husbands at the same time.
Sex-bots.
Sex-cyborgs.
Arab Emirates run out of oil and become a gigantic Disney Land on drugs.
All legally bought electronics have built-in DRM, digital fingerprinting, watermarking and such. The feedback loops allow the content providers to identify those, who release copyrighted materials into 'the wild' without authorization. Laws are put in place to make copyright violations to be the most heinous crime of all times, worse than murder but not as bad as tax evasion.
Oh, and taxes. Well, they will grow.
You can't handle the truth.
The article is just stating current events and the author's own current likes and dislikes. More than likely many of the companies and items mentioned will be different by 2029. Especially since the rate of change is increasing. Where was Google and Yahoo 22 years ago or many of the technologies we use today? Not even on the radar back in 1985. Many of the Slashdot readers may not have even been alive yet or were still in diapers.
The only thing you can accurately predict is people will be fundamentally the same, only the tools they use will be different.
Just my 2 cents.
-Andy
Views of 2029:
I suspect they will only have distant childhood memories of everybody driving their own cars wherever they wanted.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Looking at some of todays teenagers I think you are a bit late with "worrying about computers that are smarter than they are." It's already here
"Lindsay Lohan was never innocent."
:(
Hopefully in the year 2025/2029 it will be "Lindsay who?" and "Paris who?" and "Britney who?". And if we're *really* lucky people might actually stop obsessing so much over the lives of people that they don't know personally or have anything to do with all together.
But I guess I'm just a dreamer
Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per
price per decade. By the time any toddler of today is finishing
graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade)
multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about
a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are
about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at
constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!)
According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS
processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think
correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking
advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)
As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal
improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such).
(somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation).
Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by
cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit,
but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for
continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there,
producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages
per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often
now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple,
since quality has changed so much).
So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a
million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster,
though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million
processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and
processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet
in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They look laughable now, no need to wait 20 some odd years.
To be fair everything looks fake once you've seen a movie a few times. You spend less time engrossed in the story and more on the technical aspects. I've noticed much of it seems to be with inaccurate or sloppy lighting for composite images or things being too perfect or too perfectly imperfect (ie Star Trek & Star Wars), rather than the level of detail. That and how ridiculous the cliche flooded action scenes have become.
My take on it will be kids of that generation will either wonder about a world that isn't entirely engrossed in civil and global conflicts or be so bored out of their minds that suicide at 40 is considered a proper end to a long and full life.
Airlines don't allow cell phones on planes for a reason that most don't understand - it's about control of information. When the passengers of a plane are in danger they are frequently kept in the dark to avoid the ensuing panic, and that wouldn't be possible if they all got phone calls about their plane being on television.
As a side note, I asked a Southwest stewardess why they turn off the lights after dark, even when it's too early to sleep. She was real shifty in her response so I kept pressuring her. She finally admitted that it's so passengers' eyes are adjusted correctly so they could see while getting off the plane after an accident!
-R
2. Will ride bicycles and electric trikes - cars are too expensive.
3. Will not be able to afford air travel, which will be largely the province of the super rich and the military.
4. Will grow some fraction of their own food.
5. Will be lucky to attend university.
6. Will mostly graduate from trade schools in maintenance (plumbing, HVAC, cabinetry, ensolarisation projects, or agriculture.
7. Will remember several small limited local nuclear wars, and know or know someone who knows someone who died in them.
8. Will hate their parents and grandparents for being such an idiotic bunch of uniformed greedheads.
9. Will bear the brunt of the Powerdown.
10. Will know or know someone who knows someone in the refugee transit camps in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho.
11. Will be trying to figure out a way to move north, or northwest, where it's cooler.
12. Will consider gay marriage as normal as any other kind of marriage, because marriage is a matter of metaphysics, and government doesn't care about that - gov't cares about contracts and property.
13. Will look back at the Bush administration as a complete and utter failure, and those who voted for Bush as complicit in his war crimes, as the German People were complicit in WW2 and the Holocaust.
14. Will realise that technology is not energy, and will know how to calculate Energy Return on Energy Invested in their heads, much as the class of 1976 was able to calculate grams of coke vs. ounces of colombian pot...
15. Will know how to darn their own socks.
16. Will remember the internet as the predecessor of what became "transparent" and they simply see it as "media". 17. Will laugh at Kurzweil for being such a tool, as machine intelligence is STILL 30 years off.
18. Will know that fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was 20 years ago.
19. Will help tear up the broad asphalt streets to be replaced with narrow cobblestone.
20. Will raze their grandparent's McMansions because they were build like crap, and the land is more useful as farm land.
21. Will live in cities or in small towns clustered near railroad depots.
22. Will eat organic food because there isn't enough natural gas left for fertiliser and pesticides anyway.
23. Will know how to stoke a wood fire in the morning to warm the house in winter and get a pot of tea boiling.
24. Will change their outer clothing less often, but change their under clothing every day. The outer clothing will be more strongly built and durable. They will repair their own underwear.
25. will find digital media will not exist - it's all digital, so "digital" media has no meaning.
26. Will be able to procure all of the films of Warner Brothers (or any other film company), including cartoons, on a single deeply encrypted drive.
27. Will be able to procure a drive that contains every song ever released by a given music company.
28. Will the depth of media daunting and much of it will be ignored.
29. Fine Art will finally be completely digested and shat out by the entertainment industry as simple entertainment for the educated. Some will argue this had already happened by 1995...
30. Will find The Long Emergency in full swing. Billions dying off in Africa and Asia, millions perishing in Europe and North America as the human species loses its fight against Mother Nature and the laws of thermodynamics.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It was a shot at the ignorant view that Islamic terrorists will be responsible for nuclear attacks. You know who I suspect are going to carry out nuclear attacks- PEOPLE WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Unless you just want to establish a baseline to prove the progression that the next generation, so full naive ideals, red-hot urine, and youthful self-righteousness, will turn out to be just as big a lot of destructive, selfish, short-sighted cretins as every other generation that has gone before.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
* That scientists had always agreed about the global cooling problem. /. had always been populated by retirees who had never had sex.
* That
Photo scrapbooks will be digital, with printouts being kitschy..
Most people will max out around a terabyte of music.. because its more than they will ever get around top listening to. This will be a small chunk on their thumb drives.
The old Colbert reports will have references too obscure to follow.
South Park will be mainstream wholesome viewing... While some new show comes along to violate our sense of morality.
Mass Transit will still seem to be a pipe-dream for the US..
People will still be procrastinating the 2038 audits..
Storm